Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Tammi Benjamin Under attack: A troubling Double Standard at the University of California.

A troubling double standard appears to exist when it comes harassment at the publicly funded University of California. The University has taken strong action against harassment, physical assault, terrorization and targeting individuals on the basis of their ethnic origin or religion -- except when the person under assault is Jewish, and the perpetrator is a member of an antisemitic or jihadi front group. Then UC administrators have no time to answer emails pleading for protection...

Only one professor in the entire University of California so far has had the intestinal fortitude to speak out about the growing jihadi harassment of Jewish students on campus, a beloved part-time professor of Hebrew at U.C. Santa Cruz, Tammi Benjamin, who has appeared often in AT articles.

After the Civil Rights law was re-interpreted to include Jews in 2010, Tammi Benjamin made history by successfully applying for the federal Office of Civil Rights to investigation the hostile environment for Jews at UC Santa Cruz. If she wins, it will be first time the Civil Rights law is applied to antisemitism.

Tammi is AMAZING. I've taken dozens of language classes in my life, and Tammi is hands down one of the greatest teacher's I've ever had. Her lesson plans are great, the course is thorough, and she is dedicated to helping you learn AND get a good grade. You'd have to honestly try to do badly in her classes. Wonderful person, wonderful teacher.

Frustrated by the increasing level of anti-Semitic intolerance on campus, as well as the vitriolic rhetoric directed against her personally Tammi Benjamin wrote a letter to the President of the UC system

As Tammi describes in a letter to the president of UC published this week on the website of her organization, the AMCHA Initiative, she is being harassed mercilessly for having exercised her free speech off campus…. In her letter to President Yudof, Tammi detailed clearly antisemitic actions tolerated on UC campuses, which are illegal by university rules.At an SJP rally at UCB in 2002, UCB Lecturer Hatem Bazian, then a graduate student and co-founder of the first SJP chapter in America, told a large crowd, "Take a look at the type of names on the buildings around campus -- Haas, Zellerbach -- and decide who controls this university."Former Nation of Islam member Imam Abdul Malik Ali, a frequent speaker on many UC campuses, has railed against the "disproportionate numbers of Jews, Zionist Jews, in the media, in finance and foreign policy."At an MSU-sponsored speech at UCI in 2001, Imam Mohammed Al-Asi said: "We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew". Al-Asi also actively promotes the lie that Jews were behind the 9-11 attack, stating: "Where were the 4,000 to 5,000 Israeli Jews that were supposed to be in those two buildings on the 11th... Did they know something we didn't know?"Imam Abdul Alim Musa, a frequent speaker for the MSU at UCI, sells at some of his events copies of an antisemitic book, The Ascendant Qur'an, which blames Jews for conspiring against Islam. Musa maintains contact with virulently antisemitic groups such as Jamaat al-Muslimeen, which promotes Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

Tammi concludes her letter:

As a result of the hostile environment created by these chapters and their members, Jewish students have reported feeling physically unsafe, harassed, and intimidated while on campus, and some have even reported leaving the university, avoiding certain parts of campus, and hiding symbols of their Jewishness. Students can be pro-Palestinian without resorting to physically confrontational, disruptive, and virulently aggressive behavior and it is this behavior, which continues to escalate, that deeply concerns me. Expressing support for the Palestinians is not the same as chanting "Death to Jews!" "Death to Israel"...O Jews, the army of Mohammed is coming for you," or holding banners that read "Death to Zionism" and "Long Live the Intifada."

The quiescence and timidity of the academic community in the face of these continuing personal attacks on Prof. Benjamin must be challenged. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr famously declared "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Its time to break the silence.